Thursday, August 23, 2012

Wow, I can't believe how much anger and resentment I've built up over the years for Blizzard's MMO, World of Warcraft. Unbalanced PVP, stale content which has been milked to its maximum potential, and a massive, aimless grind. Then there's Diablo 3. Massively overhyped and a great letdown in terms of graphics quality, itemization, and balancing. The only saving grace for Blizzard as far as I'm concerned, is Starcraft 2. And even that has been tarnished by the recent UI-fuck-up that patch 1.5 brought to the game.

Enough is enough. I'm turning my back on Blizzard and paying more attention to other promising games developed by smaller companies unburdened by complacency and corporate greed.

Mechwarrior Online, currently in closed beta and being developed by Piranha Games Inc, looks good. I've been waiting for a Mechwarrior game for a long time, and so have many other people who are fans of the BattleTech series.

Wasteland 2, in the early stages of development by InXile Entertainment, is another game which I'm looking forward to. Brian Fargo, who Executive-Produced Wasteland, one of the most acclaimed games in the golden age of computer role-playing games, has assembled quite a few talented game designers, programmers, artists and writers for this task. Among them are:Chris Avellone, a game designer who worked on Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas.Colin McComb, a writer and designer who has worked on Planescape Torment and Fallout 2.Mark Morgan, the composer for Fallout 1/2 and Planescape Torment.
Jason Anderson, the co-creator of Fallout.
Along with the original game's primary designers, Alan Pavlish and Michael Stackpole.

Just started playing Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, and I must say, it rocks! Multiplayer is a bit glitchy though. I've always been a fan of Transformers and there's something really addictive about playing as a giant robot and smashing things up.

I'm also occupied with building my dream city in CityVille. Before you sneer and jeer, don't look down on Facebook games, especially ones made by Zynga. According to appdata.com, CityVille has 20 million monthly active users as of August this year. Definitely nothing to sniff at.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

New User Interface in Starcraft 2. Horrible UI design. Looks like a 10 year old designed it.

To fully appreciate the difference in UI designs, you'll need to view the full-screen image of each screenshot. Some web browsers don't render the screenshots in full screen mode, like Firefox. For Firefox users, after clicking on the thumbnail of the screenshots below to get to the enlarged version, you'll need to right click on the image and select "View Image", then click on the magnifying glass.

1. The profile summary screen.

Sharp edges give a clunky feel. New UI looks and feels very mechanical and old-fashioned, like a programmer who's been told to design a UI did it. The old UI has a softer, curvy, more high-tech look-and-feel to it.

New UI

Old UI

2. The Achievements screen.

What the fuck are the tool (spanner) icons doing below each achievement picture? They look out of place and incongruent with the rest of the UI. Just make the achievement icons clickable for fucks sake.

New UI

Old UI

3. The quick match screen.

Terran, Zerg and Protoss race pics look like a cut and paste job of 2D-art off the internet. Poor color contrast between Terran/Zerg/Protoss/Random logo and their corresponding background pictures. What happened to the cinematic backgrounds for each race?